Book Talks

Book Talks 2024 - 2025

Book Talks are designed to give UM faculty with a humanities focus an opportunity to share their recently published books with the community. Faculty generally present on their research and take questions from the audience.   

Please join us for another academic year @ Books & Books (265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134)! Please RSVP for the program to allow for set-up. Programs take place on Monday evenings, starting at 6:30pm. 

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  • Monday, August 26: Henry Green

     

    Monday, August 26 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Henry Green, Professor of Religious Studies

    Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands, by Henry Green & Richard Stursberg


    To register for this program...

     

    Join us at Books & Books in Coral Gables for an evening program about:

    Sephardi Voices: The Untold Expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands by Henry Green & Richard Stursberg.

    In the decades following the founding of Israel, close to a million Jews were forced from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran. This story of state-sanctioned discrimination, violence, and political unrest is told with stunning photography and gripping first-hand accounts from survivors. They tell of violent persecution and daring midnight airlifts—but also of a world left behind, and new lives in new lands. This is a story of Jewish history, of a resilient people finding strength in the face of terrible injustice.

    Henry Green is Professor of Religious Studies and the former Director of Judaic and Sephardic Studies at the University of Miami, Florida. He is the Founding Director of MOSAIC: the Jewish Museum of Florida, and of Sephardi Voices, an audiovisual digital archive of Arab Jews. He has served as a Visiting Fellow at Oxford University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has given testimony to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in the United States as an advocate for the rights of those displaced. Professor Green is the author or co-author of four books, including Research in Action (education of at-risk populations in Israel); The Economic and Social Origins of Gnosticism (Jewish origins from a sociological perspective); Mosaic: Jewish Life in Florida; and Gesher Vakesher, Bridges and Bonds: The Life of Leon Kronish (the Israelization of American Jewry and the story of Jewish Miami) and many articles. Currently, Professor Green is the International Director of Sephardi Voices.  The project’s mission is to record, document and preserve the memories of Sephardi/Mizrahi Jews, to make them digitally accessible similar to the Shoah/Holocaust project, and to immortalize the legacy that stretches back to the prophet Jeremiah, the writings of the Talmud and Maimonides.

  • Monday, September 16: Brian D. Blankenship

    Monday, September 16 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    The Burden-Sharing Dilemma: Coercive Diplomacy in US Alliance Politics

    Brian D. Blankenship, Assistant Professor of Political Science

    To register for this program...

     


    Please join the Center for the Humanities at Books & Books for a Book Talk by Professor Brian Blankenship. 

    The Burden-Sharing Dilemma examines the conditions under which the United States is willing and able to pressure its allies to assume more responsibility for their own defense. The United States has a mixed track record of encouraging allied burden-sharingwhile it has succeeded or failed in some cases, it has declined to do so at all in others. This variation, Brian D. Blankenship argues, is because the United States tailors its burden-sharing pressure in accordance with two competing priorities: conserving its own resources and preserving influence in its alliances. Although burden-sharing enables great power patrons like the United States to lower alliance costs, it also empowers allies to resist patron influence.  

    Blankenship identifies three factors that determine the severity of this burden-sharing dilemma and how it is managed: the latent military power of allies, the shared external threat environment, and the level of a patron's resource constraints. Through case studies of US alliances formed during the Cold War, he shows that a patron can mitigate the dilemma by combining assurances of protection with threats of abandonment and by exercising discretion in its burden-sharing pressure.  

    Blankenship's findings dismantle assumptions that burden-sharing is always desirable but difficult to obtain. Patrons, as the book reveals, can in fact be reluctant to seek burden-sharing, and attempts to pass defense costs to allies can often be successful. At a time when skepticism of alliance benefits remains high and global power shifts threaten longstanding pacts,The Burden-Sharing Dilemmarecalls and reconceives the value of burden-sharing and alliances. 

    Brian Blankenship is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Miami. He joined the department in the fall of 2019. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of international relations, international security, and international cooperation, with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the politics of military alliances. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in May 2018 and his B.A. in Political Science from Indiana University, Bloomington, in May 2012. 

  • Monday, October 7: Traci Ardren

    Monday, October 7 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Everyday Life in the Classic Maya World

    Traci Ardren, Professor of Anthropology

  • Monday, October 21: Eziaku Nwokocha

    Monday, October 21 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States

    Eziaku Nwokocha, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

  • December 2: Logan Connors

    Monday, December 2 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    Theater, War, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France and Its Empire

    Logan Connors, Professor and Chair of Modern Languages and Literatures

  • Monday, January 27: Kunal Parker

     

    Monday, January 27 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books, Coral Gables

    The Turn to Process
    American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870–1970

    Kunal Parker, Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Intellectual Life and Dean's Distinguished Scholar

  • Monday, February 10: Catherine L. Newell

    Monday, February 10 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Food Faiths: Diet, Religion, and the Science of Spiritual Eating

    Catherine L. Newell, Associate Professor of Religious Studies

  • Monday, February 24: Pamela Geller

    Monday, February 24 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection

    Pamela Geller, Professor of Anthropology

  • Monday, April 7: Ben Lauren

    Monday, April 7 @ 6:30pm

    Book Talk @ Books & Books

    Hold Me Down: Toward a Rhetoric of Feel

    Ben Lauren, Chair and Associate Professor of Writing Studies

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